liam's picture
Fri, 21/07/2006 - 9:30am — liam

The griding train crash and media spectacle that is the NSW Young Liberals is entering another day with John Hyde Page’s right-of-reply.

[Devine’s] argument is doubtless one that has already been made, but only in the most smoky backroom of Australian politics, and by the most hardened of hacks.

As usual Andrew Norton makes a great deal of sense at the newly domain-named Catallaxy, noting that anti-political-correctness is not a particularly new or original method of getting attention and annoying your enemies.

In mocking the excessive sensitivity of the left to racial and sexual differences the right has ended up where the left was in the 1960s, trying to offend basic decency and disrupt social order.

Time, perhaps, to skip down the nostalgic route to another, larger, conference disrupted by the forces of disrespect and reflex anti-authoritarianism, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention.

The Yippies, a social movement and unorganised group of the late 60s, half-forgotten and half-blanked-out, inspired themselves with liberal doses of drugs and the works of Abbie Hoffmann, author, anarchist, media stunt genius and author of the deservedly famous Steal This Book! (PDF, probably not safe for work if your bosses are fascist pigs and don’t like you reading bomb recipes).

Consider the very well-cooked and more than half-baked memories of ex-Yippies:

And we were motherfucking bad. We were dirty, smelly, grimy, foul, loud, dope-crazed, hell-bent and leather-jacketed. We were a public display of filth and shabinees, living in-the-flesh rejects of middle-class standards.
We pissed and shit and fucked in public; we crossed streets on red lights; and we opened Coke bottles with our teeth. We were constantly stoned or tripping on every drug known to man.
We were the outlaw forces of Amerika displaying ourselves flagrantly on a world stage.
Dig it! The future of humanity was in our hands!
Yippie!

The official Communists supposedly used to refer to Hoffmann and the Yippies as ‘Groucho Marxists’ for their lack of seriousness. Does this make the NSWYL Abbott and Costello Liberals?